The US media has lost one of its sanest voices on military matters – so let’s hope William Arkin’s absence is brief

by ROBERT FISK

PHOTO/Democracy Now!/YouTube

I hate television “experts”, the infamous “analysts”
who know all – and support all – about the military, the televisual
ex-generals with vain presidential ambitions and the infamous American
“think tank” personnel whose right-wing, pro-Israeli beliefs are
carefully shielded from viewers by the US networks who employ them. I
always characterise the antiseptic and pseudo-academic institutions to
which they belong as the “Institute for Preposterous Affairs”.

The Fisk “IPA” contains hundreds of robotic folk
who will churn out claptrap about “key players”, “stakeholders” and
“moderate allies” and, of course, “world terror”. They turn up on CNN,
Fox and Russia Today. And, of course, the BBC.

But William Arkin
was always a bit different. This ex-US marine intelligence author of
ground-breaking work on secret CIA “black sites” and equally secret US
weapons dumps (nuclear and non-nuclear) has a respectful audience at
both Harvard and Maxwell US Air Force Base. And when he quits, I take
notice.

Here’s a guy the Reagan administration wanted to
send to prison for revealing the location of US and Soviet nuclear
weapons, and who – in his own words – “had to fight editors who couldn’t
believe that there would be a war in Iraq”. He’s just resigned his job as a talking head. Goodbye NBC News. That’s what I call a real story.

And here’s what Arkin told his colleagues about the American military when he left NBC last week. “There is not a soul in Washington,” he wrote to them, “who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the [David] Petraeuses and Wes Clarks, or the so-called warrior monks like James Mattis and HR McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who have sadly and fraudulently done little of consequence.

“And yet we embrace them… We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: there is not one country in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago.”

Arkin’s draw – for me, at least – is that he
doesn’t suck on the rubber tube of Wikileaks or social media
whistle-blowers. He prefers to dig down through the pages of dull,
boring real military information available in serious army and air force
journals and official government documents. I came across his work when
a reader in Japan sent me pages from Arkin’s book Code Names: Deciphering US Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World.

I was investigating just how Israel
was able to maintain its massive aerial bombardments of Lebanon and
Gaza without running out of “smart” bombs, cluster munitions and
air-to-ground missiles. Even Nato ran low on ammunition in the 1999
Serbian War. But not Israel when it was blasting its enemies – including
lots and lots of civilians – in the Middle East.

So here is what I found in Arkin’s work
as long ago as 2005. “Quietly,” he wrote, “the US maintains
pre-positioned equipment and munitions on Israeli soil for use by US and
Israeli forces. The War Reserve Stocks for Allies-Israel (WRS-I)
programme includes ammunition owned by the US but intended for Israeli
use, overseen by the army and Marine Corps.”

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